In honor of Holocaust Remembrance, KLRU will be airing programs throughout the month of April highlighting Jewish achievements and remembering the victims of the Holocaust.

Nova “Holocaust Escape Tunnel”encores on Thursday, April 20 at 8:00 pm. In the heart of Lithuania, a Holocaust secret lies buried. A team of archaeologists probes the ruins of a Nazi death camp to find the truth behind tales of a tunnel dug by desperate Jewish prisoners and their daring escape.

Escape from a Nazi Death Camp encores on Thursday, April 20 at 9:00 pm.
October 14th 2013 was the 70th anniversary of an event that shook the Nazi party to its core. In east Poland, at the remote Nazi death camp of Sobibor, 300 Jewish prisoners staged a bloody break out. To mark the anniversary, this film travels back Sobibor with the last remaining survivors to reveal their extraordinary story of courage, desperation and determination. The film uses brutally honest drama-reconstruction and first hand testimony to reveal the incredible escape story.

For Sunday, April 23 — Holocaust Remembrance Programming includes:

Violins of Hope premieres on Sunday, April 23 at 1:00 pm
For Jews during the Holocaust, there wasn’t much reprieve from the despair and horror surrounding them, but music-particularly that of violins, which hold an important role in Jewish culture-offered temporary solace and a glimmer of humanity. Violinists in concentration camps were sometimes treated better and even spared their lives because of their ability to play this important instrument. VIOLINS OF HOPE: STRINGS OF THE HOLOCAUST follows the journey of Israeli violinmaker Amnon Weinstein in his efforts to restore violins recovered from the Holocaust, and captures the lessons and highlights the music the instruments now bring to others.

Through The Eye of the Needle: The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz airs on Sunday, April 23 at 4:00 pm.
As a Holocaust survivor, Esther Nisenthal was 15 years old in October of 1942 when the Jews of her village in Poland were ordered by the Nazis to report to a nearby train station. Esther refused to go. Instead, saying goodbye to their family, she and her 13-year old sister Mania invented new identities for themselves as Polish Catholic farm girls, hiding in plain sight from the Nazis. Esther’s story of survival is remarkable on its own.

Independent Lens “Last Laugh” premieres on Monday, April 24 at 9:00 pm.For Holocaust Remembrance, INDEPENDENT LENS premieres “The Last Laugh.” The Holocaust would seem to be an absolutely off-limits topic for comedy, but history shows that even the victims of the Nazi concentration camps themselves used humor as a means of survival and resistance. To explore this question, “The Last Laugh” weaves together an intimate portrait of Auschwitz survivor Renee Firestone alongside interviews with influential comedians and thinkers ranging from Mel Brooks to Chris Rock, and meshes in powerful, rare footage of cabarets inside the concentration camps themselves.